From BBC:

A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light. The device uses the tendency of a fluid to travel through small channels under its own force, instead of using pumps. The design is simpler, requires less blood be taken, and works more quickly than existing “lab on a chip” designs, the team report in Lab on a Chip. It has a flexible design so that it could be used for a wide range of diagnostics.

Much research in recent years has focused on the chemical and medical possibilities of so-called microfluidic devices at the heart of lab-on-a-chip designs. These microfluidics contain between dozens and thousands of tiny channels through which fluids can flow, and as micro-manufacturing methods have advanced, so has the potential complexity of microfluidics. Now, scientists at IBM's research labs in Zurich have developed a cheap lab-on-a-chip that has the potential to diagnose dozens of diseases.

More here.

From My Shelf Runneth Over:

The Reader is a novel that has generated some controversy because of the way it characterizes Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate German who worked as a prison guard at Auschwitz. The trial of Hanna forms the central point of the novel, and her lover tells its story. People have therefore been concerned that Bernard Schlink seeks some kind of sympathy or absolution for the more ignorant perpetrators of the holocaust. I think the accusation is unfounded. The novel does ask its audience to confront a story they've not yet been asked to confront: how do non-Jewish Germans recover from the stain upon their country and their forbears, who, whether tacitly or not, consented to the persecution of millions of humans?

I think it important to note that the novel has a misleading title. The narrator, young Michael Berg, is the eponymous”reader,” but only in the eyes of Hanna. By giving the book this title, Schlink suggests that the important perspective is Hanna's. Hanna, however, is never the agent who defines meaning in the novel. Rather, she is an object that moves in and out of the the narrator's life, and allows him to put a face on the atrocities of the war and to prevent them from becoming numbing cliches.

More here.

A generation of British Islamists have been trained in Afghanistan to fight a global jihad. But now some of those would-be extremists have had a change of heart. Johann Hari finds out what made them give up the fight.

From The Independent:

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have “come out” in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

The television commercial for the wildly successful Xbox 360 video game Gears of War (2006) – which has, so far, sold more than five million copies – opens with an image of a war-torn cityscape silently smouldering; it radiates as much sinister Gothic pathos as a Tim Burton film. As a view of this digitally-rendered war zone unfolds, a hunched, metal-clad Übermensch appears. He stares dolefully into a pool of water, alone, apparently, in the aftermath of a great battle, his square jaw, weathered skin and narrowed eyes oozing the stoic resolve of the most iconic anti-hero. As this sensitive brute cradles the semi-obliterated face of a porcelain putto in his palm – a passage so heavy-handed it is almost camp – the ground around him begins to erupt and, in an effort to escape, the commando flees quite literally into the jaws of a ravenous alien beast; part scorpion, part beetle and wholly flight-of-fancy. The commercial fades to black just as our nameless hero unleashes a hail of bullets upon this seemingly unassailable monster, the drama of this David-and-Goliath encounter emphasized by a moody tenebrism worthy of Georges de La Tour.

more from Christopher Bedford and Jennifer Wulffson at Frieze Magazine here.

From Wired:

Recently released images from Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland adaptation reminded moviegoers that the quirky London-based director possesses one of the most extravagant visual vocabularies of any filmmaker now working. Underscoring that fact, New York’s Museum of Modern Art kicks off a Tim Burton retrospective Nov. 22 with a collection of 700 art pieces produced by the goth maestro over the past three decades.

As a companion piece, the auteur behind fantastical spectacles Mars Attacks!, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman and a host of other morbidly twisted movies is publishing The Art of Tim Burton, a 434-page tome packed with drawings, doodles, paintings and evocative concept art dating back to Burton’s teen years in Burbank, California. “Most of what appears in this book was never intended to be seen by anyone,” Burton writes in a preface to the book, noting that his collaborators sorted through “40 years of notebooks, scraps of paper, napkins, etc.” Author and co-editor Leah Gallo writes that Burton’s intention is “to allow his fans a broad look inside his private pages.”

More here.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

By Theodore Roethke

From Scientific American:

In a few short weeks, world leaders will assemble in Copenhagen for the much anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their goal: to draft an agreement that will limit global warming, chiefly by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the 12-day meeting gets closer, the chorus from jaded pundits and politicians gets louder: “It can’t be done.”

Nonsense. The naysayers have two reasonable concerns. One: Countries will never agree on limits because they are out to protect their own interests, which differ. Two: Even if they reach an agreement, it will never hold because it will raise energy prices, which people will resist. Fortunately, both worries can be resolved.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

More here.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

It's one thing to be afraid of terrorism. But there's no real reason to be afraid of terrorists, and as Daphne Eviatar argues, there's good reason not to look like you're afraid of terrorists:

The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide.

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations.

More here.

In Guernica Magazine:

Amitava Kumar: Here’s a question: is war more a fact of life for South Asians? Is it a consistent theme in fiction written in the South Asian diaspora?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s hard for me to answer that with complete confidence when I still struggle with the question of how race and ethnicity relate to literary genres and classifications. How do you think it does? People often talk to me of South Asian literature, and I’m not sure what they mean—writing by South Asians? About South Asians?

Certainly, writers in the South Asian diaspora deploy a great variety of styles—but some common themes. All fiction is political in some way, and it’s interesting to see fiction play out in some South Asian spheres in which talking about politics has become dirty, something polite people don’t do. And of course fiction does all sorts of things, goes all sorts of places, that polite people don’t go. So I was fascinated to ask some terrific fiction writers about politics and war and see what would rise to the surface, what would bubble up, and what would stay in the background.

And some things also stay in the background because in parts of South Asia and its diasporas, war and a kind of unstable politics have been normalized. I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitized? And how does one write about violence without fetishizing it?

Tara McKelvey in the Boston Review:

When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

In the Immanent Frame:

Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination…

Talal Asad: José suggested that I should talk a little bit, first of all, about some of the main points from yesterday’s lecture. The lecture was an exploration of a number of concepts that that seem to me to lie at the origin of human rights, something I’m thinking about for my next book. But if I could just summarize, first, some things from that lecture, then I will try and make some points about Professor Abdullahi’s work, particularly his famous book, which has been much more influential than mine—my work on secularism is purely academic, you know; it tries to determine where the real effects of politics come from—and also to indicate the things that I think are good about secularity and then pose some questions I had, which it would be good to have you answer. And finally, I’ll say a few words about actual politics. I would like to begin with the effort to move some of our countries towards a more democratic form of politics and government and so on, which is not always the same thing as speaking about what one would like to see.

I basically tried to stress a couple of things yesterday, and perhaps I should focus on the most important ones. First of all, that the emotions that we talk about, like compassion and sympathy, which are supposed to lie at the base of human rights, are really much more mobile, much more unpredictable, much more uncontrollable than one thinks. They are both necessary and dangerous, one might say.

Our own Kris Kotarski in The Calgary Herald:

Earlier this fall, British company Internet Eyes figured out a way to cash in on CCTV. It bills itself as “an online instant event notification system” that will allow “viewers” to “anonymously monitor random video feeds streamed from privately owned establishments.”

“Viewers” in this case are people. “Events” are crimes, imagined or real. And the “instant event notification system” must be the object of desire for every generalissimo in the world, aspiring or real.

Internet Eyes bills its service as a game, where people “report crime as it happens,” scoring “points” for “neutral” alerts when the “viewer” acts in good faith but does not report an actual crime, or “positive” alerts when a crime was actually committed. The first results in one point; the second in three. A “negative” alert brings zero points, which does not help when one aspires to win the £1,000 monthly prize, to be awarded to “the highest crime scoring member every month.”

“This is about crime prevention,” founder James Woodward told the BBC, as his company prepares to charge “viewers” £1 per alert and CCTV camera owners £20 each month to add their footage to the central database. “What we're doing is we're putting more eyes onto those cameras so that they are monitored.”

More here.

No offense to other etiquette guides, but Laura Claridge says these are impeccable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

1. On the Civility of Children's Conduct

By Erasmus

1530

The great classical scholar of the Northern Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, also had some thoughts about proper behavior. Teach manners early, Erasmus believed. To that end, he produced this small book addressed to children. It admirably commanded the attention of his young audience and remained popular for three centuries. “To lick greasy fingers or to wipe them on your coat is impolite. It is better to use the table cloth,” he counsels. Also: “It is not seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.” He returns repeatedly to the era's apparently vexing problem of the gaseous bellows: “Retain your wind by compressing the belly” and “Do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.” If attempts at restraint fail, he advises, then do what you must but “cough loudly” to cover the sound.

2. Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior

By George Washington

1748

Though often credited with writing this treatise on manners, the 16-year-old George Washington at best merely translated the rules compiled in 1595 by French Jesuits. A translation had already appeared in England long before the young Washington produced what may have been a school assignment, but in the folklore associated with our nation's first president, his name has been attached to the advice given in “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior.” In any event, the American document retains its interest as a window into the standards of behavior that Washington thought, early on, to set for himself and, by extension, for his nation. One of the rules would become increasingly relevant to the leader after he received his ivory (not wooden) dentures: “Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.”

More here.

Darryl Campbell in The Bygone Bureau:

After all, almost no one in the under-30 set — certainly no one under twenty — can remember what it was like to grow up under the shadow of the Soviet Union. We Millennials grew up fearing nuclear power plants more than ballistic missiles; we’ve drawn our political battle lines around legalized abortion and gay marriage, not Marxism and its derivatives. And however we understand our nation’s role in the world, whatever present or future threats we might see in China, Russia, or the Islamic world, we know that we are far removed from the East-versus-West world of the Cold War. Soviet-style Communism has gone, in the words of Leon Trotsky, into the dustbin of history.

In a 1989 essay, Francis Fukuyama argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that there were no viable alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy. We’d arrived, in other words, at the “end of history.” I don’t know if his thesis is true or even provable — Fukuyama himself later backed away from it in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future — but it seems to me that he’s at least got something right about our relationship to the past.

Those of us who grew up after the Wall fell may never completely understand what it was like before November 9th, 1989.

More here.

Mustafa Qadri in The Guardian:

Although the Taliban have openly claimed responsibility for the recent epidemic of suicide bombings against civilian targets in Peshawar and Islamabad, many Pakistanis appear convinced that the real culprits are India or the United States.

“These are India's agents,” an anti-narcotics bureaucrat tells me in Islamabad with a confident grin. With its operatives active in a string of Indian consulates along the Pak-Afghan border, so goes the popular claim, they direct New Delhi's latest attempt to topple the Islamic Republic. It is a common refrain in Pakistan. In fact, so common, that almost everyone I venture to ask blames the Indians, or Americans, or foreigners for the terrorism.

The country has faced many crises over the years, but these are particularly unsettling days. In the past, violence tended to be unilateral: avoid the angry mob on days of protest, neighbourhoods patrolled by gangs, or criticising vocal mullahs and life was generally quiet. But today's enemy moves with stealth and could be anywhere.

Already poor migrants from Afghanistan and the central Asian republics have been evicted from the slums of Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi on the suspicion that someone among their numbers is responsible for the violence. But these are just the small fry, and even the media and the government claim there is good intelligence implicating foreign powers.

So where, one has to ask, do these rumours come from?

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

I just saw something quite weird in Amsterdam. David Sedaris describes it in Esquire:

In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station.

Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully thin and dresses not unlike the pope, topping his robes with a tall hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is a carryover from his former career, when he served as a bishop in Turkey.

One doesn't want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn't use to do anything. He's not retired, and, more important, he has nothing to do with Turkey. The climate's all wrong, and people wouldn't appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not true. While he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No one can spy on him, and he doesn't have to worry about people coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in that outfit, he'd most certainly be recognized. On top of that, aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn't speak Spanish. He knows enough to get by, but he's not fluent, and he certainly doesn't eat tapas.

While our Santa flies on a sled, Saint Nicholas arrives by boat and then transfers to a white horse. The event is televised, and great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I'm not sure if there's a set date, but he generally docks in late November and spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

“Is it just him alone?” I asked. “Or does he come with some backup?”

Oscar's English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

“Helpers,” I said. “Does he have any elves?”

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but I couldn't help but feel personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic. “Elves,” he said. “They're just so silly.”

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.”

More here. [Thanks to Ram and Ramani.]